So untidy

Libya for instance. I read the news, and was horrified when Gaddafi troops poured fuel over their own and immolated soldiers unwilling to fire on protesters. There were reports of patients killed in their hospital beds, their bodies taken away to remove the evidence. Clean-up crews scooping up corpses newly slain and sluicing away the blood to tidy the streets of Tripoli.

I prayed for justice, against the perpetration of evil.

The world at large, the powers that be, seemed hung in the stays.

Now I watch sleek needled fighter planes take off to make and enforce a no-fly zone and part of me says, “These are the keepers of Guantanamo Bay, and Private Manning,” can I trust them either?

I remember Morris West’s haunting novel Harlequin. In the fight against unquestioned evil Harlequin comes to the crunch,

But I couldn’t deceive Bogdanovich and he wouldn’t let me deceive myself. . . Came the day when a decision had to be made. I went to see him at the flower shop. He was playing with a tiny kitten, a stray that had wandered in from the street. He asked me to state exactly what I wanted. I told him: my money back, and Yanko’s life for Julie’s. He didn’t argue the decision. He simply broke the kitten’s neck and laid it on the desk in front of me. Then he said, ‘That’s what it means, Mr. Harlequin. Can you do it?”

It has been a long time since I’ve read the book. I no longer remember the plot. But that paragraph has never left me.

I still pray to the righteous Judge of all the earth, because I believe that prayer is a critical element in the universal war against evil. I pray that the Judge of all the earth will do right.